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Request for favorite quotes!

We're doing some late Summer renovations at The Cult and one of the sections we would like to improve upon is our Book sections. We never had a great Quotes addition to each book section. Rather, I had to do outside links to other fan pages that had compiled their list of quotes. But many of these fan sites are no long gone, rendering the link defunct on our end.

So we need you to help us out! Everyone post their favorite CHOKE quotes in this thread as replies. After a week or so, we'll take all the quotes and compile them a new quotes sub-section for the respective master section.

“More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”

"Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass. The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me. Have me paged."

"You know that ancient Greek girl?" Paige says. "Who drew the outline of her lost lover?" I say, "yeah." And she says, "You know that eventually she just forgot him and invented wallpaper."

"The innkeeper deals acid to the busloads of bored teenagers who get dragged here on school field trips. These kids sit in rapt attention watching while Mistress Halloway cards wool and spins it into yearn, the whole time she's lecturing them on sheep reproduction and eating hashish johnnycake."

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong.
You save people by letting them save you.
All you have to do is stay fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.
People really need somebody they feel superior to.

You want to shout in everybody's old toothless face. Yes, I kidnapped that Lindbergh baby.
The Titanic thing, I did that.
That Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.
The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.
The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again.

"For crying out loud," she says. "This is way out of bounds. I said you could rape me. I did not say you could ruin my pantyhose."

"Just supposing," I say, "she's going to scramble its little unborn fetus brain and suck the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you know who has brain damage, to cure them," I say.
Denny's lips hang open a crack. "Dude, you don't mean me, do you?"

Okay, I can't find my book, so someone help me with this quote. It's whenever he says something about how he used to use lotion to jack off, but "anything that softened the skin seemed to be counter-productive." I thought that was great. And yes, now I want to go re-read all of Chucky P's stuff.

"For sure, even the worst blow job is better than say, sniffing the best rose... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh. I think that I shal never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm. Painting a picture, composing an operra, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass."

"For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing left than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybodt bent over had no way opf knowing who was doing the ram job, and this is the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who would stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your as for real."

"The laws that keep us safe, these are the same laws that condemn us to boredom."

"Denny and me, we're about as innocent as a tumor. Harmless as a psilocybin toadstool."

"A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway."

"If motherhood is the new God, the onlything sacred we have left, then I've just killed God."

"Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it's every way you always wanted to get laid but didn't know how. Of course, all this is to help you realize you're a sex junkie. It's delivered in a kind of "if you do any of the following things, you may be an alcoholic" checklist. Their helpful hints include:

Do you cut the lining out of your bathing suit so your genitals show through?

Do you leave your fly or blouse open and pretend to hold conversations in glass telephone booths, standing so your clothes gap open with no underwear inside?

Do you jog without a bra or athletic supporter in order to attract sexual partners?

**one of my all time favorites**
"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are... Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."

That's my favorite quote of all time. Seriously; no one could've said it better.

Luckily for y'all, I jot quotes (and a lot of 'em) when I read books. Here's mine from [I]Choke[/I]:
__________________
It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

The way you can move from city to city and always find a Catholic church, the same Mass said everywhere, no matter what foster place the kid was sent, he could always find the Internet.

As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy... Still, the counter showed more than a half million people had been to see it.
"Pilgrimage" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn't.

And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.
So deal with it.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away.
That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

It's not a big deal... We do it every day, kill the unborn to save the elderly. She asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Latex gloves, the yellow way they make your hands look, this is how cadaver skin looks. The medical cadavers from first-year anatomy with their shaved heads and pubic hair. The little stubble of the hairs. The skin could be chicken skin, cheap stewing chicken, turning yellow and dimpled with follicles. Feathers or hair, it's all just keratin. The muscles of the human thigh look the same as dark-meat turkey. During first-year anatomy, you can't look at a chicken or turkey and not be eating a cadaver.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations.
She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.

Every addiction, she said, was just another way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

Here it is again, the fine line between science and sadism. Between a crime and a sacrifice. Between murdering your own child and what Abraham almost did to Isaac in the Bible.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world being property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux disaster. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids... And because there's no possibility of a real disaster, real risk, we're left with not chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

"We are teaching our children to be helpless."
"We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship."

My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke some dope and then, the big H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress.
In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.

They're all just in it for themselves.
They all think men are obsolete. Useless. As if we're just some sexual appendix.
Just the life support system for an erection. Or a wallet.

Internet sites. All those old chatroom sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys make the sexiest cyberbabes.
Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.

I could just kill the guy who invented the dildo. I really could.

Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.
The fine line between praying and nagging.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

These are tanned people who've given up smoking and white sugar and salt, fat, and beef. They're people who've watched their parents and grandparents study and work for a lifetime. Only to end up losing it all. Spending everything just to stay alive on a feeding tube. Forgetting even how to chew and swallow...
These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.
And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
__________________
Tell me if you need any others! :-)

I love at the end of chapter 27 when Victor finally says the safe word after his "white soldiers" have ruined the girl's bedspread. ("Oh, by the way..." I say, "Poodle," and behind me I hear her first scream for real.) :D

"You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus." And the whole bit around that quotation.

But most of all, I love the ending. People I know who have read it felt disappointed with the end, expecting it all to reach an amazing climax, but I found it sort of heart warming.

"Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything."

And I find myself just reading the last pages now and then, and that final line just sticks because after seeing all the shit he's been put through and put himself through, to have the three characters standing on a mound of rocks with that line, it gives you amazing hope and optimisim. I think that's thing I love about the book the most, not only is it funny and it's dark, but just at the last moment, Chuck shines in a tiny light.

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn

Luckily for y'all, I jot quotes (and a lot of 'em) when I read books. Here's mine from [I]Choke[/I]:
__________________
It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

The way you can move from city to city and always find a Catholic church, the same Mass said everywhere, no matter what foster place the kid was sent, he could always find the Internet.

As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy... Still, the counter showed more than a half million people had been to see it.
"Pilgrimage" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn't.

And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.
So deal with it.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away.
That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

It's not a big deal... We do it every day, kill the unborn to save the elderly. She asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Latex gloves, the yellow way they make your hands look, this is how cadaver skin looks. The medical cadavers from first-year anatomy with their shaved heads and pubic hair. The little stubble of the hairs. The skin could be chicken skin, cheap stewing chicken, turning yellow and dimpled with follicles. Feathers or hair, it's all just keratin. The muscles of the human thigh look the same as dark-meat turkey. During first-year anatomy, you can't look at a chicken or turkey and not be eating a cadaver.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations.
She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.

Every addiction, she said, was just another way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

Here it is again, the fine line between science and sadism. Between a crime and a sacrifice. Between murdering your own child and what Abraham almost did to Isaac in the Bible.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world being property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux disaster. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids... And because there's no possibility of a real disaster, real risk, we're left with not chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

"We are teaching our children to be helpless."
"We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship."

My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke some dope and then, the big H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress.
In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.

They're all just in it for themselves.
They all think men are obsolete. Useless. As if we're just some sexual appendix.
Just the life support system for an erection. Or a wallet.

Internet sites. All those old chatroom sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys make the sexiest cyberbabes.
Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.

I could just kill the guy who invented the dildo. I really could.

Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.
The fine line between praying and nagging.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

These are tanned people who've given up smoking and white sugar and salt, fat, and beef. They're people who've watched their parents and grandparents study and work for a lifetime. Only to end up losing it all. Spending everything just to stay alive on a feeding tube. Forgetting even how to chew and swallow...
These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.
And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
__________________
Tell me if you need any others! :-)

the one in bolds my favourite quote ever :)
haha
i write down quotes as im reading too. :)

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